Words about words and books and things.

the obsessions of ross macdonald

I recently finished reading a whole stack of Lew Archer novels by Ross MacDonald, and I’m kind of ambivalent as to how satisfactory the experience was. I’m aware of the man’s high standing in crime fiction circles, but I’m not sure how he got to be so highly ranked. Sure, his books were well-written for the time, and considerably more literate than much of the work of his peers (like, say Mickey Spillane), but they also tended toward a certain obsessive repetition in their themes and plots. Certain phrases turn up again and again in book after book, and it seems like every one of them has at least one scene where Archer visits his wealthy clients in a house that borders on being a mansion. Those conversations are almost invariably in living rooms where the rich clients are attended to by “Negro servants” (a term that really dates the books, too). Then there’s the issue of his attitude toward women, who almost always turn out to be duplicitous and, in most of the books, the killers. By the time you’ve read three or four books in the series, the rest seem almost identical, to the point where it’s difficult to later recall which plot went with which book. So… I dunno. Hopefully the Travis McGee books, which I’ll be reading soon, will be better.